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Beekeeper Laurence Edwards accidentally trapped his queen and hundreds of drones by stacking supers on a queen excluder without an entrance. He explains why excluders block drones too, and shows how to fix the mistake and recover the colony.
Beekeeper Laurence Edwards accidentally trapped his queen and hundreds of drones by stacking supers on a queen excluder without an entrance. He explains why excluders block drones too, and shows how to fix the mistake and recover the colony.
I have made a huge mistake and killed a massive amount of bees. So when I came here today, this stack of supers was on this queen excluder, trapping the queen downstairs, but also trapping all of these drones. Now, normally when I do a configuration like this, I put an entrance in one of the boxes. The Abelo brood boxes come with an entrance to allow the drones in and out, and I forgot to do it. I'm so frustrated with myself. So this isn't just a case of losing one or two drones. At this point in the year, all of these drones were going to get booted out anyway. And the bees have clearly tried to come and boot them out and they just can't get them through the queen excluder. Queen excluder is there, it's designed to stop the queen going up, but it will also stop the drones going down. If you're ever doing a manipulation like this where you've had eggs above the queen excluder, any brood of any sort, you do need to put an additional entrance in your top box there to allow these drones out. So what do I do with all of these bees? I just have to discard them. I'm gonna clear them up. They're really crispy and crunchy because they've been there for, Quite a long time, and we've got a few live bees in here as well. So I'm just gonna, with the most amount of respect I can, kind of clear up these dead bees. I think the easiest way is just taking off this queen excluder and going and placing all of these bees over in the long grass. So you can see we've got a few live bees on there, so I'm not going to take them a million miles away. All of those live bees will go back to the hive, but you can see we've got lots and lots of dead bees. So I'm not going to put them down far from the hive. The hive is literally just there. But all I'm gonna do is just give them a little bit of COVID shake down all of the bees off that queen excluder. So today's job is to take all the honey from these supers. I'm gonna blow the bees out. They're gonna come back in, go through the entrance. Nothing's gonna block them. This colony here is gonna be ready for winter. And if you wanna rewind a good few weeks, I've done a full video showing how this colony here bounces back from a swarm. And if you wanna see that video, it is just there.
